It’s strange, but I think somewhere, somehow between making bioshock 1 and infinite, Ken Levine lost his shit.

He’s definitely not an idiot, and from what I can tell he doesn’t work with idiots…and yet, bioshock infinite was full of bad decisions, plot holes and a lack of coherence that his earlier work had in spades.

Yeah it’s a a potentially much more interesting (if unsubtle) setting. And it’s smoother and a bit more complex in terms of story telling, even with its problems. But those problems are weird and kind of kill it. And unfortunately the game play doesn’t mesh as well thematically.

I just expected less bullet spraying action. I think the bigger issue was that the whole drugs for powers RPG element thing was no longer directly thematically tied to the overall story line and setting. It was there simply because it was a bio shock game.

I remember being quite surprised at the reaction the game got vis a vis writing and story telling when it was first released. I didn’t get to it for a year or so and my reaction was very much that it was really just rehashing what had been done by many classic PC games. With an added political veneer. I replayed it when infinite came out. When there was much better thought out analysis of the game coming out. And it comes off much better sans hype.

What the game does that’s very clever, and actually new. Is underline it’s narrative with the game play. Pure free-market randian nonsense? Super powers you can buy. Free purchase of super powers leads to randian nightmare. And the player actively engages in that dynamic through the base mechanics of character advancement. The little sister big daddy thing, including the bits with the player character getting a bit more involved with that than expected. Isn’t really a usual moral choice mechanic. It’s a choice to act in an objectivist way or not. With consequences or benefits of each actively played out. The mechanics themselves do a far better. More subtle job of attacking randian politics than anything in the writing.

There’s a chameleon skin thingy you can use to avoid that. You just…stand still and go invisible after a few seconds. Beyond that, just turn around real fast when you hear the noise…they’re surprisingly slow to finish warping in; slow enough that you can actually walk up and one shot them with an upgraded shotgun the second they coalesce.

Just a note - the remastered versions of Bioshock/Bioshock 2 are regarded as being a bit problematic. I believe you can still pick up the originals on PC (or else on Xbox360/PS3) and as the art style is quite stylised, they still hold up very well.

The two DLCs for Infinite had much more stealthy gameplay. But the whole series had slightly awkward fighting (part of the charm). I liked Bioshock2 a great deal (best fighting in the series, some fresh challenges, traps, speargun, heh) and the Minerva’s Den DLC was excellent.

I loved em all, even Infinite despite its flaws. I’m thinking of picking up Prey to see if it has that olde tyme religion (and plasmids). I’d buy a Bioshock 4 in a heartbeat.

There was so much possibility with the setting and basic story of Infinite. I am glad that I played it, but it’s not a game I visit again, you know?

Columbia, even more than Rapture, felt like a real place to me. I wanted to explore more, and do more in it. So much potential. One thing I liked was the way the narrative got dark and darker. As you start off in a brash young America, and then get dragged through the reality of how rotten the foundation of slavery and labor theft was, and then descending even more into actual madness.